materialism and concrete, scientific fact. For him, Imagination is the
one great reality, in it alone he sees a human faculty that touches both
nature and spirit, thus uniting them in one. The language of Imagination
is Art, for it speaks through symbols so that men shut up in their
selfhoods are thus ever reminded that nature herself is a symbol. When
this is once fully realised, we are freed from the delusion imposed upon
us from without by the seemingly fixed reality of external things. If we
consider all material things as symbols, their suggestiveness, and
consequently their reality, is continually expanding. "I rest not from
my great task," he cries--

To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards into the worlds of thought, into eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.

In Blake's view the qualities most sorely needed by men are not
restraint and discipline, obedience or a sense of duty, but love and
understanding. "Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have
curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because
they have cultivated their understandings." To understand is three parts
of love, and it is only through Imagination that we _can_ understand. It
is the lack of imagination that is at the root of all the cruelties and
all the selfishness in the world. Until we can feel for all that lives,
Blake says in effect, until we can respond to the joys and sorrows of
others as quickly as to our own, our imagination is dull and incomplete:

Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing.

_Auguries of Innocence._

When we feel like this, we will go forth to help, not because we are
prompted by duty or religion or reason, but because the cry of the weak
and ignorant so wrings our heart that we cannot leave it unanswered.
Cultivate love and understanding then, and all else will follow. Energy,
desire, intellect; dangerous and deadly forces in the selfish and
impure, become in the pure in heart the greatest forces for good. What
mattered to Blake, and the only thing that mattered, was the purity of
his soul, the direction of his will or desire, as Law and Boehme would
have put it. Once a man's desire is in the right direction, the more he
gratifies it the better;

Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming